The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“Praise the Lord!” Pullum yelled. A few days later, when Deborah got out of the hospital, she left me a voice mail. It was my bi ...

T wo months after Deborah’s stroke, we went to Pullum’s church to watch him baptize Sonny’s nine-month-old baby granddaughter, J ...

“Most people think her name was Helen Lane,” I said. “But she was Henrietta Lacks. She had five children, and one of them is sit ...

street from a big, empty field. But it used to be across the street from the rest of downtown. I didn’t understand. If that was ...

medicine. Sonny woke up more than $125,000 in debt because he didn’t have health insur- ance to cover the surgery. Zakariyya got ...

hours later Sonny dropped by to check on her, as he did nearly every day, and found her in her bed, arms crossed on her chest, s ...

lock of her mother’s hair. “I often visit her hair in the Bible,” Deborah said into the camera. “When I think about this hair, I ...

al lawsuits while incarcerated. In 2008, after being released from prison, Cofield filed a sev- enty-five-page lawsuit—his last ...

Christoph Lengauer is Global Head of Oncology Drug Discovery at sanofiaventis, one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in th ...

in 2009, when this book went to press. Today most Americans have their tissue on file somewhere. When you go to the doctor for a ...

How you should feel about all this isn’t obvious. It’s not as if scientists are stealing your arm or some vital organ. They’re u ...

form saying that any tissues removed may be used for education or research. According to Judith Greenburg, director of the Divis ...

which refused to hear their case. When this book went to press, they were contemplating class action. Most recently, in July 200 ...

For Korn, the consent issue is overshadowed by a public responsibility to science: “I think people are morally obligated to allo ...

W hen it comes to money, the question isn’t whether human tissues and tissue research will be commercialized. They are and will ...

disease gene discovered in her children’s tissues, which lets her determine what research is done on it and how it’s licensed. G ...

censing fees, it costs $25,000 for an academic institution to license the gene for researching a common blood disorder, heredita ...

and legally) to put people in the position to do the same as Slavin. Which brings us back to the complicated issue of consent. J ...

happened. Years later, I asked Wayne Grody, who was in the thick of the debate in the nineties, why the congressional recommenda ...

T ime and time again, I saw people energized by the story of Henrietta and her cells—energized, and filled with the desire to do ...